Web 2.0

****

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November 2005

Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't,
but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes,
it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And
yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it
means what I think it does, we don't need it.

I first heard the phrase "Web 2.0" in the name of the Web 2.0
conference in 2004. At the time it was supposed to mean using "the
web as a platform," which I took to refer to web-based applications.
[1]

So I was surprised at a conference this summer when Tim O'Reilly
led a session intended to figure out a definition of "Web 2.0."
Didn't it already mean using the web as a platform? And if it
didn't already mean something, why did we need the phrase at all?

Origins

Tim says the phrase "Web 2.0" first
[arose](http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20
.html) in "a brainstorming session between
O'Reilly and Medialive International." What is Medialive International?
"Producers of technology tradeshows and conferences," according to
their site. So presumably that's what this brainstorming session
was about. O'Reilly wanted to organize a conference about the web,
and they were wondering what to call it.

I don't think there was any deliberate plan to suggest there was a
new version of the web. They just wanted to make the point
that the web mattered again. It was a kind of semantic deficit
spending: they knew new things were coming, and the "2.0" referred
to whatever those might turn out to be.

And they were right. New things were coming. But the new version
number led to some awkwardness in the short term. In the process
of developing the pitch for the first conference, someone must have
decided they'd better take a stab at explaining what that "2.0"
referred to. Whatever it meant, "the web as a platform" was at
least not too constricting.

The story about "Web 2.0" meaning the web as a platform didn't live
much past the first conference. By the second conference, what
"Web 2.0" seemed to mean was something about democracy. At least,
it did when people wrote about it online. The conference itself
didn't seem very grassroots. It cost $2800, so the only people who
could afford to go were VCs and people from big companies.

And yet, oddly enough, Ryan Singel's article
about the conference in Wired News spoke of "throngs of
geeks." When a friend of mine asked Ryan about this, it was news
to him. He said he'd originally written something like "throngs
of VCs and biz dev guys" but had later shortened it just to "throngs,"
and that this must have in turn been expanded by the editors into
"throngs of geeks." After all, a Web 2.0 conference would presumably
be full of geeks, right?

Well, no. There were about 7. Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a
suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first. I saw
him walk by and said to one of the O'Reilly people "that guy looks
just like Tim."

"Oh, that's Tim. He bought a suit."
I ran after him, and sure enough, it was. He explained that he'd
just bought it in Thailand.

The 2005 Web 2.0 conference reminded me of Internet trade shows
during the Bubble, full of prowling VCs looking for the next hot
startup. There was that same odd atmosphere created by a large
number of people determined not to miss out. Miss out on what?
They didn't know. Whatever was going to happen—whatever Web 2.0
turned out to be.

I wouldn't quite call it "Bubble 2.0" just because VCs are eager
to invest again. The Internet is a genuinely big deal. The bust
was as much an overreaction as
the boom. It's to be expected that once we started to pull out of
the bust, there would be a lot of growth in this area, just as there
was in the industries that spiked the sharpest before the Depression.

The reason this won't turn into a second Bubble is that the IPO
market is gone. Venture investors
are driven by exit strategies. The reason they were funding all
those laughable startups during the late 90s was that they hoped
to sell them to gullible retail investors; they hoped to be laughing
all the way to the bank. Now that route is closed. Now the default
exit strategy is to get bought, and acquirers are less prone to
irrational exuberance than IPO investors. The closest you'll get
to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for
Myspace. That's only off by a factor of 10 or so.

1. Ajax

Does "Web 2.0" mean anything more than the name of a conference
yet? I don't like to admit it, but it's starting to. When people
say "Web 2.0" now, I have some idea what they mean. And the fact
that I both despise the phrase and understand it is the surest proof
that it has started to mean something.

One ingredient of its meaning is certainly Ajax, which I can still
only just bear to use without scare quotes. Basically, what "Ajax"
means is "Javascript now works." And that in turn means that
web-based applications can now be made to work much more like desktop
ones.

As you read this, a whole new [generation](http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113098635587487074.html?mod=todays_
free_feature)
of software is being written to take advantage of Ajax. There
hasn't been such a wave of new applications since microcomputers
first appeared. Even Microsoft sees it, but it's too late for them
to do anything more than leak "internal"
documents designed to give the impression they're on top of this
new trend.

In fact the new generation of software is being written way too
fast for Microsoft even to channel it, let alone write their own
in house. Their only hope now is to buy all the best Ajax startups
before Google does. And even that's going to be hard, because
Google has as big a head start in buying microstartups as it did
in search a few years ago. After all, Google Maps, the canonical
Ajax application, was the result of a startup they [bought](http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2005/10/google-maps-lead-engineer-gaze
s-into.html).

So ironically the original description of the Web 2.0 conference
turned out to be partially right: web-based applications are a big
component of Web 2.0. But I'm convinced they got this right by
accident. The Ajax boom didn't start till early 2005, when Google
Maps appeared and the term "Ajax" was coined.

2. Democracy

The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now have several
examples to prove that amateurs can
surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of system to
channel their efforts. Wikipedia
may be the most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling
reviews, but they miss the critical point: it's good enough. And
it's free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles
you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were
willing to pay to read them yourself, you can't link to them.
They're not part of the conversation.

[...]

Original source